Thoughts on military mobilities, trade and capital accumulation, struggles over labour and citizenship rights in the making of transport infrastructures.
Sitting on a rooftop overlooking container ships leaving the port of Beirut and sailing into the haze of the Mediterranean and other container ships powering towards the port from the west makes me VERY VERY happy I am going to be spending the next few years of my life working on ships, ports, and shipping. […]
Turner, South Shields, 1823 My friend Isabelle mentioned the Yemeni community of South Shields to me (she also sent me that amazing Turner posted above). Significant numbers of Yemeni seafarers, who used to work on British merchant vessels, settled in various coastal towns in Britain and established seafaring diasporas. The Yemenis of Britain […]
Dubai Ports World runs London Gateway which will be competing against Felixstowe and Southampton to be the top container port in the UK. Like many other DPW concerns, there seems to be an iron (or ham-) fisted determination to not let workers unionise – although protests seem to have stymied this effort for now. I am hoping to visit the […]
Dead Water by Simon Ings is the most fabulously dystopian novel about shipping, containers, ships, airships, tsunami, shipping, and dastardly deed that can happen when vast numbers of ships are circumnavigating the globes with vast numbers of containers on board. One of his main characters invents containers: The box does not sway, or ping, or flex, […]
I am really looking forward to my trip aboard a container ship… The ship above is a liquid natural gas carrier, so it will have a different feel, but the feeling of being on the seas… It seems to be the thing to do nowadays, even by historians who don’t work on the contemporary era. […]
Regimes of land tenure and ownership must form significant elements in the development of ports. How quickly do these regimes change? What are the processes by which title deeds are issued, exchanged, bought, and sold? Are there demonstrable differences between the land tenure regimes in the different countries of the Middle East? And differences […]
“The more developed the capital, therefore, the more extensive the market over which it circulates, which forms the spatial orbit of its circulation, the more does it strive simultaneously for an even greater extension of the market and for greater annihilation of space by time. Only in so far as the direct product can be realized […]
From Melville’s Billy Budd: …war contractors, whose gains, honest or otherwise, are in every land an anticipated portion of the harvest of death…. And he is the inventor of “fog of war” too: Forty years after a battle it is easy for a noncombatant to reason about how it ought to have been fought. It […]
I am ashamed to admit that I was a latecomer to the magic of Allan Sekula. Far too much of a latecomer. I discovered his stunning work on shipping and transport, last year; he died in August last year. His amazing film Forgotten Spaces stays with you, flashes of sound, slivers of images, whole stories, the mood […]
I hate to use the formally inventive and affectively brilliant Cities of Salt (by Abdulrahman Munif) as a sociological text or a total mirror of reality, which is what so many people do probably because until America’s Kingdom came along very few texts actually gave us something so powerful about the texture of racialisation in Aramco’s labour camps […]
